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Hendry completes rout of Higgins

Stephen Hendry completed a crushing 13-4 victory over John Higgins on Saturday afternoon to reach the quarter-finals of the Betfred.com World Championship.

The seven-time champion's long-awaited first Crucible encounter with his fellow Scot, a four-time winner in Sheffield, failed to live up the expectation that it would go close.

Higgins played perhaps the worst session of his career on Friday night to gift it 7-1 to Hendry, who had already been 5-3 in front after a tighter morning eight frames.

And armed with a 12-4 lead, there was no way Hendry was going to lose the match.

Higgins looked nicely set to take the opening frame of the afternoon but missed a pink, and a break of 64 from Hendry left last year's champion needing a snooker.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Higgins played on, with professional pride kicking in. But he could not find the snooker he required, and when he left a red on, Higgins offered his hand in defeat.

Hendry, who plays another Scot, Stephen Maguire, in the last eight, admitted the one-sided nature of the match, and particularly the middle session, had surprised him.

"Last night was probably one of the strangest sessions of snooker I've played at the Crucible," said Hendry. "I'm fortunate in the fact John's probably not played as bad in his life at the Crucible as he did last night. You feel lucky if you get one or two chances against John in a frame - I was getting at times four, five or six chances in a frame.

"And at times I was coming to the table in shock and not really knowing what to do because it was weird. But you've just to try to win the frames whatever way you can."

Meanwhile, three-time champion Ronnie O'Sullivan developed a 5-3 lead over Mark Williams, winner in 2000 and 2003, in their second-round clash.

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